Darwinian Jerry Coyne muses on hashtag hate

Darwinian PZ Myers has been doing some thinking about what the new atheism didn’t accomplish and now we have Darwinian Jerry Coyne seems to be doing some thinking too, in the wake of the Covington meltdown, which revealed the nullity of traditional media:

This is about the Covington Mess and how both social and mainstream media, by going with their confirmation bias, is ruining America. And I agree. I’ll give a couple of good quotes:

Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.

. . . To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

Musing from his own reading experience, Coyne also directs us to Britain’s Guardian, one of whose writers seems determined to present the story as he wishes it had been:

When Wilson writes something like this, did he ever care about the truth? I don’t think so; he just wanted to maintain that the Covington students were still pariahs while dissing the conservative media that painted them as heroes. Nobody was a hero in that narrative, but neither were the boys nor the Native Americans pariahs.

He then turns to other current events topics and seems to have found some good reading.

But now, speaking as a news writer of about five decades standing, I (O’Leary for News), find that the biggest single change from decades past is the relative lack of interest among major media figures in getting things correct.

I first became interested in the topic with Rathergate in 2004, when CBS news icon Dan Rather promoted to the public a dossier on George W. Bush that, by any media standard had to be suspect.

As Canadian newsman Rex Murphy asked at the time, “What were they thinking?” Okay so they didn’t want Bush to be president again. Then didn’t they think their own reputations for accurate Watergate-style reporting mattered?

Unlike Watergate, Rathergate slammed back on the news team, not the president. That can happen when media go with clearly suspect documents.

And just before the Covington uproar, where both conservative and liberal media rained down condemnation on the heads of a group of teens waiting for the bus without getting all the relevant facts, another story grabbed attention that, as veteran newsman Phelim McAleer says, should never have run. There were too many legitimate questions about the accuracy of one of the journalists preferring it. No surprise, it collapsed in ruins but that was eclipsed by the social media meltdown and libel law threats around the Covington boys waiting for their bus.

These are deeply sick media. They no longer care about getting stuff right. I read about a thousand journalists losing their jobs and I wonder, how much worse is that than a thousand bartenders losing their jobs? Will society really be worse off?

It will be interesting to see how or if the major media decline affects public discussion of the riddles of design in nature.

* Mind you, this was the guy who — abandoning the usual prostration of Big Science before the Raging Woke, started calling out the mob’s anti-Semitism* So let’s see what happens next.

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is the author of a book, also called Why Evolution Is True. He’d started to call out the anti-Semites among the Marching Woke recently. Couldn’t happen soon enough.

and

About the facts of life, Darwinian Jerry Coyne is still being stubborn … Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne continues to refuse to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact (Coyne was president of an evolution society which has started to wobble on whether sexes are real divisions.)

and

Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? Ah, not a moment too soon.; Here is a perfect specimen of sp. SJW, Trollus inyerfaceus. We have certainly dealt with them. Coyne may find some in his own backyard.

See also: New atheism is over, says Darwinian PZ Myers To judge from PZ’s post, it looks as though the new atheists are turning on each other instead of on the rest of us. Doesn’t a proverb somewhere cover that?

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6 Replies to “Darwinian Jerry Coyne muses on hashtag hate”

News, it is obvious that the boys were targetted by agit prop activists and complicit media, who were able to play to the already established projections of demonisation that have been running riot. This then mobilised the social media mobs who fear that their agendas are being challenged. The result was death threats, attempts to wreck the reputation and education of minors, slander and libel. That was the bridge too far, as even flawed US defamation law protects minors on a negligence standard, the Internet mobs could not get away with what but a few months ago they did to Mr Kavanaugh. The mother of all lawsuits is brewing, with ruinous consequences to major media houses and social media giants as a likely outcome, not just financially but reputationally. As for those who committed felonies by threatening minor students, they are about to learn the hard way that irresponsible behaviour motivated by groundless animosity can cost you dear. Maybe, just maybe, this will help to wake many up to the peril our civilisation now stands on the brink of. I pray, that that at least, will do us some good through a severe mercy. KF

Kairosfocus, a huge problem here is that traditional media abetted the worst instead stamping it out with more accurate information (a more usual role).

If it takes a few hours to see the bigger picture, then it just does. And people who rush into print with nonsense beforehand expose themselves to liability if they cause harm. It’s the fact that traditional media joined them in doing so that is the big problem here in my view. Maybe the lawsuits will hasten their demise but then one must ask, what good were they doing anyway?

\As it is,,a story is emerging of people who were doxxed and threatened who had nothing to do with it.

We need new rules for social media but Big Brother should not be making them. We need normal new rules.

Social media has wrongly identified a Cincinnati, Ohio teenager as the high school student who engaged in a confrontation with a Native American protester, leading to a slew of online attacks.

Michael Hodge and his family were subject to threats after being doxxed — having personal information shared online — according to his older brother, Andrew Hodge. According to a Sunday Twitter thread by Andrew Hodge, members of his family were harassed and spammed with “threats of physical violence” after their parents’ address got posted online.

“My parents, uncles, & aunts, receive messages stating they are pieces of [SNIP] parents and won’t be able to protect #MichaelHodge forever… seriously what kind of behavior is this?” Hodge wrote.

That’s at least a second state and it is clear grounds for lawsuit and likely prosecution.

I have said here before that the secular progressive/ social justice warrior left, which dominates if not controls the mainstream media (MSM,) exploits race as a wedge issue. For example, if you replay the whole tape of the incident with the Covington Catholic school boys (not just a heavily edited portion of it) you will see that the incident was initially instigated by a group of racist blacks who then began angrily confronting a group of Native Americans who were gathered there for their own rally. The school boys were literally not even in the picture at that point. This is something, despite reluctantly admitting they have “egg on their face” the MSM have left out of their coverage.

”the left’s argument that blacks can’t be racist was disproven the moment the Black Hebrew Israelites entered the picture. This explains why the MSM gave them a black privilege pass by leaving them out of their reporting altogether. Conservatives now have a face to point to that isn’t that of a white male when dealing with racism in America. This is a positive thing. If race-relations are going to improve in America, both sides must acknowledge racism is a heart issue, not a Caucasian issue. We can thank the Black Hebrew Israelites for that revelation. If racism dies in America, so does the democratic party. Therefore, they’re motivated to keep hate alive. We mustn’t allow that to happen.” (emphasis added)

However, don’t hold your breath. The MSM is not going to abandon the narrative that racism is rooted in “white privilege,” patriarchy and colonialism etc. That is: they are not interested in reporting the truth but rather an agenda driven narrative. They call that journalism; I call it propaganda.

I’m interested in improving race relations in my society. You can only do that by looking at the truth even if the truth is sometimes ugly.